Hundreds of Big Bear High School yearbooks have been recalled because of a picture showing a 17-year-old boy with his hand up his date’s dress, officials said Thursday.

The photo may involve sexual penetration and constitutes child pornography, said Cindy Bachman, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

✪ Woman says she’s too ‘educated’ to be kicked off New York train

A woman traveling on New York’s Metro North train line was recorded by a fellow passenger telling train employees that she is too “well-educated” to be told to quiet down and not use profanity in her cell-phone conversation.

“Do you know what schools I’ve been to? How well-educated I am?” she asks the train employee, who is seen explaining to another employee that she asked the passenger to stop using the “F-bomb.”

“I’m sorry do you think I’m a little hoodlum?” she asks, then demands her money back and dares the conductor to stop the train.

Black hole fires beams at Earth while destroying star: a massive black hole has been discovered devouring a star, causing the star to shoot beams of energy at Earth. The event is thought to occur only once every 100 million years.

Virtually every article about the flooding mentions that the Fort Calhoun plant was shut down on April 9. On May 27, the Omaha World-Herald reported, “The Omaha Public Power District said its nuclear plant at Fort Calhoun, which is shut down for maintenance, is safe from flooding.” The implication is that being shut down makes a plant safe. But as the ongoing crisis in Fukushima demonstrates, nuclear fuel remains hot long after a reactor is shut down. When Fort Calhoun is shut down for maintenance and refueling, only one-third of the fuel in the reactor core is removed. Besides the hot fuel remaining in the core, there is even more fuel stored in the spent-fuel pool, which is not shut down. According to a May 2011 report by Robert Alvarez at the Institute for Policy Studies, there are an estimated 1,054 assemblies of spent fuel, weighing 379 tons, at Fort Calhoun.

Three hundred miles southwest of Fukushima, at a nuclear reactor perched on the slopes of this rustic peninsula, engineers are engaged in another precarious struggle. The Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor — a long-troubled national project — has been in a precarious state of shutdown since a 3.3-ton device crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel, cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods at its core. Engineers have tried repeatedly since the accident last August to recover the device, which appears to have gotten stuck. They will make another attempt as early as next week.

US scientists claim to have discovered a dangerous new plant disease linked to genetically modified crops and the pesticides used on them.

The research, which is yet to be completed, suggests the pathogen could be the cause of recent widespread crop failure and miscarriages in livestock.

Emeritus Professor Don Huber from Perdue University says his research shows that animals fed on GM corn or soybeans may suffer serious health problems due to the pathogen.

“They’re finding anywhere from 20 per cent to as much as 55 per cent of those [animals] will miscarriage or spontaneously abort,” he said.

✪ Formative Experiences with Nude Imagery

I’m 35. I come from an era in which pre-teens had to go on cultural-archeological digs not just for porn, but also for punk music, so-called art house movies, strange literature, and underground comics. We shoplifted, sent away for zines and catalogs, and traded with each other to get our hands on contraband materials. But something we probably have in common with the youth of today, and all kids ever, is that when we were even younger, images seem to have sought us out—not the other way around. That brings me, finally, to the subject of this post, which is a few of the images that, at some point early in my life, lodged themselves into the nascent “this is what turns you on” portion of my brain. These things are running around in there even now, perhaps a little more spectral with each year, but working their influence nonetheless.

The table of five had just minutes earlier ordered dessert: two helpings of Bananas Foster, a sweet, spectacular flambe dish sauteed in butter and ignited with rum.

But as server Ian Monsalvo poured the 151-proof liquor into the pan, a sudden burst of flames erupted. Caught in the blaze was Hudgins, 25, an elementary school teacher, whose fiance’s parents had invited her to dinner.

Nick Salzer, 20, an Ozona Blue chef and aspiring firefighter, raced from the kitchen, tore off Hudgins’ burning dress and stomped out the flames. With others, he guided Hudgins to a couch in the lobby and covered her with a blanket as an unidentified woman frantically called 911.

General sluttiness is surely among the attributes preening liberals refer to when they bray about “San Francisco Values.” From the Mission to the Marina, from the “soiled doves” who ruled the Barbary Coast to the present-day skank chain-smoking in front of Vertigo, we are a city of the lecherous, the depraved, and the polyamorous.

This open secret is confirmed in a new study commissioned by condom-maker Trojan, which found that among residents of the major U.S. cities surveyed, San Franciscans reported having had sex with the greatest number of people. We clocked in at an average of 30 partners. (Not all at once, mind you — even San Franciscans face certain physical limitations.) At the bottom of the list were Chicagoans, who reported, on average, having had 11 partners.

An escaped convict was caught following a day on the loose after he knocked on the door of a cabin in the woods – only to find out the man renting the lodge was an off-duty guard at the prison he just fled.

Researchers looking for signs of life elsewhere in the universe often start by looking for one key ingredient necessary to complex life as we know it: water. And just 750 light-years away, they’ve found quite a bit of it spewing from the poles of a young, sunlike star that is blasting jets of H2O into interstellar space at 124,000 miles per hour.

Whereas descriptions of online addiction are controversial at best among researchers, a new study cuts through much of the debate and hints that excessive time online can physically rewire a brain.

The work, published June 3 in PLoS ONE, suggests self-assessed Internet addiction, primarily through online multiplayer games, rewires structures deep in the brain. What’s more, surface-level brain matter appears to shrink in step with the duration of online addiction.

“I’d be surprised if playing online games for 10 to 12 hours a day didn’t change the brain,” says neuroscientist Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who wasn’t involved in the study. “The reason why Internet addiction isn’t a widely recognized disorder is a lack of scientific evidence. Studies like this are exactly what is needed to recognize and settle on its diagnostic criteria,” she says.

A British student is facing extradition to the United States and up to five years in jail for running a website that offered links to pirated films and television shows.

✪ UFO over Mexico City

A research team from Open Minds captured photos of a strange, seemingly biologic UFO in the sky above Mexico City. For more details, you can read the full story in the August/September 2010 issue of Open Minds magazine.

A Montana resident says an energy company has identified the cause of a brief power outage as “deer with wings.” Lee Bridges says she was outside with her dogs around the time the power went out when a NorthWestern Energy truck pulled up, giving her a chance to ask the driver what caused the problem.

She says he pointed up and said, “Apparently, we’ve got deer with wings.”

“Once you go outside the hoard and you start covering that unions and workers are fighting against cut-backs from a powerful mayor and they want Wall Street to pay higher taxes, well, those are likely your sponsors if you are a big commercial news operation,” explained journalism Professor Jeff Cohen.

As the media treads carefully around the issues, the people’s anger is growing – so how many will be camping out here before the media is shaken out of its self-imposed oblivion to report what matters?

The TSA, in alliance with a whole host of federal, state, local agencies as well as military personnel, is currently conducting a massive “security exercise” throughout Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia.

“The participating teams are composed of a variety of TSA assets including federal air marshals, canine teams, inspectors and bomb appraisal officers. They will be joined by state and local law enforcement officials to supplement existing resources, provide detection and response capabilities. The exercise will utilize multiple airborne assets, including Blackhawk helicopters and fixed wing aircraft as well as waterborne and surface teams,” reports the Marietta Times.

Although the exercise is couched in serious rhetoric about preparedness, it relates to “no specific threat” and the details are nebulous to say the least and seems to revolve around little else than testing out high-tech surveillance equipment and reminding Americans who their bosses are.

Located about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant is owned by Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) who on their website denies their plant is at a “Level 4” emergency by stating: “This terminology is not accurate, and is not how emergencies at nuclear power plants are classified.”

Russian atomic scientists in this FAAE report, however, say that this OPPD statement is an “outright falsehood” as all nuclear plants in the world operate under the guidelines of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) which clearly states the “events” occurring at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant do, indeed, put it in the “Level 4” emergency category of an “accident with local consequences” thus making this one of the worst nuclear accidents in US history.